AWS

Anyone can download Linux for free, so it was no surprise that Amazon offered the open-source operating system on the free tier of Amazon Web Services.

But now the company has added a free version of Windows Server to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, too.

"We are excited to announce that starting today, the AWS Free Usage Tier will now include Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server," Amazon told EC2 customers today. "Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can now use up to 750 hours per month of t1.micro instances running Microsoft … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The technical hurdle preventing the iPhone from coming to T-Mobile USA could be cleared when the next iteration of the phone comes out.

That's the opinion of Neville Ray, chief technology officer of T-Mobile, who said he believes the iPhone never made it to T-Mobile because of the unique band of spectrum, known as AWS, that it uses for its wireless network.

T-Mobile has been left out in the cold as the other national carriers--and regional carrier C-Spire--have begun selling Apple's hit device. CEO Philipp Humm, speaking at a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show today, … Read more

Recently, I've noticed a meme spreading through Silicon Valley that questions whether Amazon Web Services' (AWS) current dominant position will hinder the cloud. The short answer: not at all.

I was in a venture capital meeting last week where we were told by one prominent VC that, "Two years ago Amazon was a blessing to startups. Today it is neutral. In two years it may well be a curse." How so? By building up Amazon Web Services to include many services currently offered by other vendors.

And while Amazon does continue to roll out new services, it'… Read more

The big IT vendors continue to miss the key factor to the adoption of their cloud products: developers.

This past week Oracle announced that it would soon release a new "cloud" product--WebLogic Server 12c (the "c" is for cloud, get it?). The release is geared toward deploying Java EE 6 applications via servers that can be virtualized in a private cloud environment.

Essentially this new offering lets users deploy apps that they would have previously deployed on a physical server into a virtualized environment. And yes, this is something they can pretty much do already, … Read more

Nikon finally joins Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic, Sony, Fujifilm, and, well, all the other camera manufacturers by adding a rugged point-and-shoot to its lineup. The Coolpix AW100 is waterproof down to 33 feet, shockproof to 5 feet, and freezeproof to 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

Up front is a 5x f3.9-4.8 28-140 with sensor-shift image stabilization, on back is a 460K-dot resolution 3-inch screen, and inside is a 16-megapixel backside-illuminated CMOS sensor.

Features include Action Control (which seems stolen straight from Olympus) that lets you change settings by tapping the sides of the camera or shaking it; full HD movie capture … Read more

Cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Amazon's move reflects the ongoing adoption of public cloud services by government entities, including the U.S. Treasury's Recovery Accountability and Transparency board, which hosts Recovery.gov and Treasury.gov on AWS, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which processes telemetry data and high-resolution images on an array of EC2 cluster compute instances.

The announcement also … Read more

As cloud adoption continues to soar, the debate between public and private continues apace. While I am a fervent believer in the public cloud, I do believe there is a lot of opportunity for private clouds in many areas, especially industries that have strong technology footprints and experience with large data center management, such as financial services and government.

Over the weekend I read a piece by Jonathan Feldman that really showed how challenging private cloud solutions can be. Lots of dependencies on non-mainstream software packages coupled with a lack of cloud-specific skills shows the lack of maturity in the … Read more

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

The Amazon Web Services outage in April created uncertainty about the reliability of the cloud. And while the outage may have cast doubt about its ability to handle mission-critical applications, Xeround CEO Razi Sharir, whose MySQL cloud database-as-a-service goes into general availability today, sees the event as an opportunity to better understand the unique characteristics of the cloud environment--namely availability and elasticity.

Via an e-mail interview, Sharir maintained that high availability in the cloud is different from maintaining availability in a traditional data center because there is limited control over the cloud infrastructure. He notes that in the cloud, high … Read more